Nat Adderley

The name of Adderley is one of the most famous in postwar jazz. But Nathaniel "Nat" Adderley, the cornettist and composer who has died aged 68, spent much of his life in the shadow of it, because he knew people were usually referring to his elder brother, the saxophonist Julian "Cannonball" Adderley, one of the leading lights of the hard bop jazz movement of the 1950s.

Nat shared many of his celebrated sibling's musical qualities - forthright lyricism, catchy composing and muscular, hard-driving improvising - and some listeners inclined to the view that he was the sharper soloist, less inclined to soul-jazz grandstanding, bolder in concept and more creative in his reshaping of his influences. After Cannonball's premature death in 1975, the jazz public slowly woke up to these possibilities.

Nat Adderley's direct line of musical descent was from Dizzy Gillespie, but he had listened attentively to all kinds of brass players - including the visionary New Orleans musician Henry "Red" Allen, the mainstreamer Bobby Hackett and the urbane Clark Terry - and combined their voices to make a memorable one of his own. He could play ballads with sublime eloquence and expressiveness, yet, in his uptempo bop mode, he could exhibit a glittering precision that made his work vibrant and energetic without histrionics.

Both Adderley brothers were born in Tampa, Florida, and began performing in local and high school bands. By the mid-1950s they had intended to build their careers together, but their quintet ran into financial difficulties, and the problem of a music business hailing Cannonball as the newcomer to fill the chasm left by the death of Charlie Parker in 1955.

Nat had already proved he could be an attraction in his own right. Having switched from trumpet to the brighter cornet in 1950, and then played in an army band, he was spotted by Lionel Hampton after demobilisation in 1953. When Cannonball was working in the Miles Davis Quintet, Nat was partnering jazz celebrities, including the bop trombone virtuoso JJ Johnson, and appearing in Woody Herman's bands. When the Miles Davis group went through one of its periodic reinventions - after the Kind Of Blue album - the Adderleys reconvened as a partnership, and delivered a popular brand of blues and gospel-influenced bebop. Over the next decade it was one of the few incarnations of jazz to compete for visceral appeal with rock 'n' roll.

During this fruitful association, Nat Adderley wrote several staples of the repertoire that became classics of the idiom later dubbed "soul-jazz" - most famously Work Song, but also Jive Samba and Hummin'. The brothers also worked on a musical dedicated to the folk hero John Henry (Shout Up A Morning), which was performed at Carnegie Hall in 1976, and on Broadway a decade later.

After Cannonball's death Nat ran his own group, keeping faith with the open style they had explored together, and including such Cannonball-aware alto saxophonists as Sonny Fortune and Vincent Herring. He continued as a bandleader (and periodically a teacher, taking seminars at Harvard and elsewhere) until 1997, when the diabetes that ended his life began to undermine his health.

Adderley is survived by his wife, Ann, a son, daughter, and five grandchildren.